


Room

by firecrackerx



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 08:41:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2541407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firecrackerx/pseuds/firecrackerx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After LaFontaine is taken, Lola Perry cleans and remembers. Set after episode twenty-seven of the webseries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Room

**Author's Note:**

> Infinite thanks to fellow creampuff LadyMinevra for acting as beta extraordinaire.

Perry steps over the broken mug and the little pool of milk on the floor to kneel, and starts picking the pieces one by one. There's so much to do. The room is a mess.

A mess.

She remembers how it looked with its naked walls the first time they had seen it. Remembers how they had arrived at Silas during the night and had to drag the many bags they were carrying to their new room guided by a senior who introduced herself as their 'temporary Floor Don, provided by the Summer Society'.

"Did something happen to the official one?" asked LaFontaine while they all climbed the stairs, trying not to disturb the quiet hours of the residence.

"Oh, she just..." the girl waved a hand. "You know, people come and go from Silas a lot, not everybody can cope with the rules."

"The Floor Don was _expelled_?"

"Something of the sort. Don't really have all the details. Well! Here's your new room. You must be tired and it's pretty late so I'll leave now, but you should really read your handbooks tomorrow and have a look around campus. And if you need anything, come find me," she smiled, already closing the door. "Goodnight."

The room looked so bereft Perry could not help but frown. It was also smaller than she had imagined, with its two narrow beds. LaFontaine huffed softly by her side. They looked at each other and sudden recognition flashed in their eyes, each of them sure about what the other would say. Perry opened her mouth, but LaFontaine was faster:

"It's too late to unpack!"

She clicked her tongue, but relented.

"Tomorrow, no excuses," she whispered. "But only because it is very late and we have to wake up early. We are on a tight schedule."

LaFontaine decided not to discuss any further, even though the tight schedule was entirely Perry-made, and looked at the beds instead:

"Do you think it will be too loud it we try to push them together now?"

"Yes, I do. We'll wake up the whole residence if we try. We'll do that tomorrow, earlier" whispered Perry opening one of her bags and taking out a neatly folded nightgown. It looked strangely familiar in the new room.

"Yeah..." murmured LaFontaine slightly disappointed, watching Perry change into her nightgown and put the rest of the clothes away efficiently. "Well... which bed are you taking tonight?"

Perry sat down on one of the beds while she worked to let her hair down.

"This one. And so are you."

"Oh," LaFontaine bit down a smile. "It looks a little narrow for two."

"Drawing conclusions before running the experiment? I wasn't expecting this from you of all people..."

LaFontaine changed hurriedly into the first shorts and t-shirt to be found and after many suffocated laughs, one pillow to the face and two kisses, the experiment was complete and the bed was declared, in fact, too narrow for two people and perfect to spend the night.

Perry felt her heart beating fast after the brief mock fight. She was unused to that kind of games –and almost any other kind– that had always looked frivolous to her since she was a child. But something in LaFontaine prompted her to do things like inviting her to very narrow beds, smashing pillows against her face and laughing like a wild child at two in the morning. When she managed to fit her body comfortably with LaFontaine's, like pieces of clockwork, there was still the shadow of a smile in the corners of her lips, and the stark, unwelcoming air of the room had been completely forgotten.

She remembers opening her eyes the morning after and realizing she was not home. The place was dark and filled with unfamiliar silhouettes and angles and it was not until she blinked a few times that she recognized her bags. Silas. She was in their new room, at Silas. That was her luggage. That noise was the alarm. And that under her face was LaFontaine's shoulder. The four walls were as naked as the night before, but something had changed them in little ways; the space in-between, the core of the room, was now warm with kisses and secrets.

"Your hair is tickling my nose..." muttered LaFontaine.

"It's almost nine. We need to get up," Perry reached outside the bed to mute the alarm. The blinds were down, but thin spears of grey light leaked through them. LaFontaine yawned loudly.

"Or we could stay in bed."

"No, no, no... We have to see what the campus is like by day, visit the cafeteria, you have to get a written permission to visit the laboratory and read the student's handbook... And we need to unpack."

"Or we could stay in bed and celebrate that we finally have a room of our own, a bed and a door with a lock on it."

"Absolutely not."

That's what she had said, but she also remembers how they left the room almost two hours and a half later and how they hurried towards the stairs. LaFontaine's hair was still wet from the shower and Perry was buttoning her shirt up. She was mortified by how careless she had been, mortified by the noises that someone could have listened to, restless with shame as soon as she stepped outside of the already safe halo of their room.

"I can't believe we just lost all morning..." she murmured to chase away the thoughts.

"Don't look at me, the last ones were not even my fault."

"Susan!" she whispered. "We are in public."

"We are alone in a corridor."

"A corridor full of doors leading to rooms where people live."

"Okay, then. I am just saying that... I may have wanted ‘toast’ for breakfast..." LaFontaine arched an eyebrow, "but I sure didn't tell you to make the second serving. Or the third one."

Perry stopped to wave a finger in front of LaFontaine's face and whisper urgently:

"Enough. That is quite enough. Toast... is not even a thing I am acknowledging."

"You are denying the existence of toast?"

"I am denying all you've said since we left the room!" she looked suddenly distracted as she stopped to brush something off LaFontaine's shoulder. There. All clean. All smooth. Better. After that little gesture she felt somehow mollified.

 

Perry fixes the mess. Takes the broken mug and cleans the spilled milk. Scrubs the spot on her knees until her knees hurt. All clean. All smooth. She is not feeling better. But there's so much to do.

 

"There's so much to do," she told LaFontaine before giving her the schedule for the day. "If you finish before I do, please go back to the room and unpack. It feels like we are living in a cheap hotel and all we have is two beds and a desk."

LaFontaine promised she'd make the place more comfortable; Perry didn't believe it for a second and spent the whole day thinking of gentle ways to let her know why unpacking was important and how she would arrange the clothes for both of them. When she came back LaFontaine had unpacked nothing but the old blanket they used to watch movies back home and her laptop, and was waiting for her with their beds already pushed together.

"I asked about the laboratory visits, and I read the student handbook and I talked to my new tutor, but since we were running a little late on the schedule, I thought we could do the big unpacking tomorrow. So I just unpacked the essentials to make the room a little more like home for the night," she said in her shy way. She had the half smile Perry knew so well because it always meant LaFontaine had done something she should be annoyed with. But she never was, as much as she tried. Her heart was melting, even with the pile of unpacked bags in sight, and by the time she slipped under the blanket and they started negotiating what they would watch, the room really felt like home.

 

LaFontaine brought a giant stack of paperwork back to the dorm with her a few weeks later. Apparently, she said, working in one of the laboratories at Silas required some insane level of  bureaucratic nonsense to be filled out, even if you were going to do it with a supervisor and other students and as part of a class. Perry was not happy with this information. She had spotted enough supernatural things –that she had very politely unseen– to know those laboratories were probably a death trap.

"You will be careful, won't you?"

"Of course I will..." murmured LaFontaine, reading. "Don't worry, I'll be with a lot of people in there."

"That only means more potential victims, you know?" said Perry, trying to sound casual while piling ingredients around the sink. So many things could go wrong in a laboratory. So many things. Perry didn't let the thought fester by allowing the precise and orderly calculations of baking to take over her mind.

"Hey, Perr, listen to this. Gender: Male, female, both, none, it does not apply, unknown, other..."

"What?"

"Right? This is the best paperwork I've ever seen... Well, two questions after that it says to enumerate all operational limbs, and you can write one to eight of them, but... I still think the gender thing was pretty great."

"Sure," said Perry. "No reason not to be as inclusive as possible with the student body, I guess."

"Eight-limbed bodies included?"

"That's a _typo_ , Susan."

LaFontaine had looked like she was going to say something, but she hadn't. Now Perry remembers.

 

By the end of the year, the room was filled with pictures of them together. Perry didn't mind. It was their room now, and inside their room they did as they pleased. Their things would touch and overlap all over the place. The clothes she had kept in separate drawers at first had slowly mixed during the year. She didn't care anymore. She would wear one of LaFontaine's shirts for the day sometimes and find the clothes had kept the memory of her skin and barely a touch of her familiar smell. Back then, Perry would hurry back to the room after classes and lock the door, hungry for kisses. She remembers repeating Susan's name in her head as she kissed her. It had taken her way too much time, guilt, baked goods, and kisses in the dark, but at least in their room, at least in her heart, she didn't care anymore that things had not gone as she planned and that she had fallen in love with her best friend.

 

Perry remembers thinking back then that things had gone much better than planned, now that Susan was in her life. But Susan is gone. LaFontaine. LaFontaine. LaFontaine, LaFontaine, LaFontaine. She scrubs the kitchen sink harder.

 

LaFontaine and Perry got drunk as soon as they returned to their room at Silas for their second year. They locked the door and produced the bottle from its hiding place behind a shelf.

"To the new Floor Don," said LaFontaine raising her glass with a smile.

"And to being back," added Perry. Back home with you, she had thought. But she was not that drunk. Perry remembers how she dedicated the rest of her night to getting drunk enough. But it hadn’t worked.

 

"What is that, dear?"

"Oh, just some experiment I brought to take notes on, it's nothing dangerous," said LaFontaine turning around to look at her.

"Take it away right now."

"Oh, no, don't worry, Perr. It's totally safe."

"It's already on fire."

"What? No, of course not... Oh, fuck! Wait, don't put it out, I need to record this!"

" _Are you kidding me?_ "

 

It doesn't matter how hard she cleans that spot on the desk, it will always be black. She tries once more, just in case.

 

Perry remembers wondering why people invited her to so many parties once she became Floor Don. She had supposed it would be the other way around. She always tried to be graceful enough and attend as long as no goat sacrifices were made and not too much nudity occurred, but something snapped inside her when she heard people knocking at her door three months into her second year at Silas.

"Perry? LaFontaine? Are you in there? Everybody's already outside!"

LaFontaine tried to get up from the bed, where she was busy with her laptop. Perry stopped her with a hand and a hush. The music from the party pulsated against the walls, and she could feel it more than hear it. She climbed on the bed and got on her knees silently, waiting for the steps outside the door to move away. She didn't want to leave the room.

"Perr, what...?"

"Sshh..." she leaned over LaFontaine, their lips almost touching. She remembers her hands moving slowly down LaFontaine's stomach, nails running over the crisp fabric of her shirt. Perry felt LaFontaine's breath hitching against her lips when she undid the button of her jeans; the zipper whispering as it went down slowly. "Let's stay home tonight."

 

She remembers every moment of that night. Also that two days later they had a fight over LaFontaine's way to close jars. Not one fucking lid was ever properly screwed, that's what she had said. It was kind of true. But not important now. Probably not important back then, either. She had called her Susan and LaFontaine had asked her not to for the first time. Perry had cried as soon as LaFontaine had left for class, cried like her soul was breaking.

 

She kept doing it, sometimes without thinking, sometimes because she looked at LaFontaine and she saw Susan, like she always had. Something that felt like part of her own life was shifting and changing under her skin, out of her control, and it was easier to let it run its course and forget it was happening. At the end of the year, a week before packing their bags, Perry remembers LaFontaine returning to their room with her head partially covered with a gooey substance she is sure she won't live long enough to forget.

"Lab'tory accident..." murmured LaFontaine, with an eye closed and heading for the bathroom.

Perry spent twenty minutes helping her wash her hair, bent over the sink.

"What kind of things do you do in that place, anyway? What is this thing?"

"It's nothing dangerous... I think. Ouch!"

"Susan, stay still!"

"Stop calling me Susan, Mommy Monster."

"That is your name! And if you call me that one more time, I swear...!"

"You swear what?"

"You are not eating toast in a long, long time!"

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" asked LaFontaine spitting out water and soap while Perry continued to wash energetically.

"You were the one who used toast as some kind of weird substitute for sex!"

"Did I?" LaFontaine laughed, trying to keep her face away from the water.

"Stop laughing, you idiot!" she protested but it was too late. She was laughing too and they were unable to stop until they were both breathless.

 

They should have talked then, maybe, if they had not been laughing like idiots, and then kissing like idiots. And the next day when she was fighting once more against the black spot on the desk and LaFontaine arrived and hugged her from behind, Perry turned around and accidentally sprayed her with the spray cleaner, but they kept smiling like two damn idiots. She remembers and her eyes sting, because even if LaFontaine had said something back then, she wouldn't have listened.

 

Perry reconstructs their home bit by bit, where just two weeks ago, the last time it had rained, LaFontaine was waiting for her in bed, the blanket and laptop already prepared when she arrived from her last class.

"Perr, you are not going to believe what just happened," she had said. "I accidentally downloaded a bunch of episodes of some baking contest."

"Accidentally, right?"

"Total accident."

Perry smiled and started changing into something comfortable:

"And, scientifically speaking, why do you think this accident happened?"

"Scientifically speaking, maybe you've been dealing with a lot of supernatural stuff lately and you look a little tired. And I think you need a day off."

With her back towards LaFontaine, she bit her lip. How was she going to turn around and say that what was really eating at her insides was the growing notion that she was losing Susan? She was still Susan in her mind, but LaFontaine wouldn't have the name anymore, under any circumstances. What was she to do with Susan, now? What was she supposed to do with the name that had been in her life for so long, the name she called when she had cried as a child and the one she had learned how to write by hers in bright colors in every notebook? The name of whispered secrets and confessions, the name written in future plans, the name she moaned the very first time she came. How could she forget about Susan now?

"I really need a day off," she finally said with a smile. "Let's have some chocolate."

"Okay. Want me to...?"

"No, no, I'll do it."

Hot chocolate, a blanket, cooking shows and LaFontaine. That's all she wanted. She'd figure out what to do, where to keep Susan, how not to lose her. She'd find out how to make sense of the situation and her own feelings. But at that moment, as she carried the steamy chocolates to bed, she just wanted to lie very still by LaFontaine's side.

"Wow, that was so fast," said LaFontaine accepting a mug. "Wait a second, did you…?"

"Just this time," said Perry softly. When she sat and leaned against LaFontaine, their bodies found a way around each other, a perfect fit. The rain was hitting the window, their room was warm and comfortable, and Perry had no idea that she was about to lose LaFontaine.

 

Perry sits on the bed in their silent room. Everything is back in place, clean, orderly. The framed pictures, LaFontaine's coat on the back of the chair, the laptop on the desk hiding the black spot, their blanket folded on Perry's bed, their books and clothes, perfectly clean and distributed.

Everything is wrong.

It feels stark naked again, like the first day. It does not feel like home. It's just a room. Perry cries until her throat is sore and her eyes feel raw. She doesn't want a name, she wants LaFontaine. She wants her eyes, her hands... No. She wants their eyes. Their hands. She wants their voice, and their laugh, and their warmth.

When she finally pulls herself together, she trembles her way into the bathroom and washes her face. She looks into the mirror, into puffy eyes and messy hair:

"Please, please, let me have them back," she whispers. "I won't lose them again. I promise I won't lose them again. I need my home back."

Everything will be alright, she thinks. Everything will be alright. She can't even consider the alternative.

Everything will be alright.


End file.
